A Fool And A Rascal

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)

holy shit OP is not only still active but is still making absolutely banger posts in this exact style 11 years later

the post below is fucking incinerated. sorry

hey guys i jus-AAAAA 🔥 AAAAAAAA🔥🔥AAA 🔥 🔥 A 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥

Does anybody wanna be sick to their stomach

To anyone who follows me, I don't care about nor trust Colossal Biosciences anymore (The people behind the "Wooly Mice"). They have proven themselves to be headline-chasing grifters after this latest stunt. They are claiming to have de-extincted *Aenocyon dirus*, aka the Dire Wolf, by editing just 20 genes from the the DNA of a Grey Wolf (*Canis lupus*) to make this thing:

If it wasn't clear from their scientific names, Grey Wolves and Dire Wolves aren't remotely related to one another aside from being Canids, despite what pop culture like Game of Thrones would have you believe. If they did look like each other, it would have had to be via convergent evolution, as they only shared a common ancestor over 5 million years ago.

This distinction, however, isn't found in the publicized articles about this so-called resurrected Dire Wolf and makes their claim that they brought the Dire Wolf back by simply editing *20* genes from the genome of a Grey Wolf laughable. A Dire Wolf would have shared more in common genetically with a Maned Wolf (*Chrysocyon brachyurus*) or Bush Dog (*Speothos venaticus*) than it would with a Grey Wolf.

Bottom line, don't fall for whatever this company is trying to tell you. If the Dire Wolf were to be brought back, it wouldn't be via something like this, and certainly wouldn't *look* like this. If you want an idea as to how a real Dire Wolf would look like in life, here is some fantastic paleoart by artist Mauricio Antón:

Addendum: I seem to have partially miscalculated Dire Wolf genetics. They were not closer to Maned Wolves or Bush Dogs, but they were still not closely related to Grey Wolves. They were basal members of Canini, related to canids like Jackals (genus Lupulella) but distinct from them. I am sorry for this misinformation in my attempt to correct other misinformation. My main point, however, is still correct.

So there's one tumblr user I follow who is a trans woman and whose likes I keep seeing on my dash for some reason. Like, there are posts on my dash from people I don't follow and there's a little green label on it that says "liked by [user]" and I realized that every time I see these posts, they're always liked by the same person (so Tumblr is only showing me this user's liked posts, no one else's) and also they're pretty much always posts about trans women and trans women's problems that also (intentionally or not) throw trans men under the bus.

So I thought, "What, is she only liking posts that shit on trans men?" So I went to her page and checked if I can see her liked posts (I can) and I scrolled through them, and lo and behold, there are all sorts of posts in there! In fact, I scrolled pretty far back and didn't see ANY posts that mention trans men. Certainly not the one that inspired me to go look at her page!

So maybe she's the only person I follow whose likes are public, and that's why I only see her liked posts, right? But why do I only see the ones that hate on trans men? Why is Tumblr pushing posts that a trans woman liked (I guess a while ago???) onto my dash, but like ones that are selected for content?

I mean I know generally why, but this is SO targeted. And now I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing these liked posts, if maybe this user I follow is staff's latest target, and they're trying to pit other users against her???

It's all very suspicious tbh. I don't wanna tag her and risk opening her up to harassment. Maybe I should send her an ask/message to find out if this is like a known problem she's been dealing with???

CRAZY HOW AFTER I POSTED THIS TUMBLR IS SUDDENLY SHOWING ME OTHER USERS' LIKED POSTS

does ANYONE have the post where it’s like “You know you’re having a good phone call when you start walking around the room” and there’s like 4 pics of a guy standing on a washing machine and sitting upside down you know what I’m talking about

thank you I love you

Today I told my wife that I had a post go viral on tumblr and she said, "Did all twelve people on tumblr like it?"

I am a 27 year old electrical engineer who works in a little secret lab in the middle of buttfuck Egypt. For one two month period, the office supply order changed from normal erasers to these, and I will not lie - every time I thought I was alone, I would sneak one out of my desk and eat it. They looked delicious. Tasted mid, but the appearance was so stunning that my brain just kept thinking, surely, the rest were a fluke, but THIS TIME it will taste like fruit and sugar.

Anyway, eventually the order stopped, and I was very worried that somehow, they’d found out that I was eating their erasers. So I kind of casually brought it up to my manager that I was sad that they swapped the erasers out, and he was like “yeah, but I kept eating them so they couldn’t stay.”

Masterclass in darning

If uppercase letters are capital letters then what the FUCK are lowercase letters

Literally lower case, fortunately!

BUT WHAT WERE THEY CALLED TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM CAPITALS PRIOR TO THE CASE

ooh ok I know this one, the technical terms for upper and lower case letters are majuscule and minuscule, which goes all the way back to when they were essentially two different latin alphabets that were not combined together in written text in the way we do now. there's actually no specific opposite term to capital that applies to minuscule letters.

however... since capital comes from the latin caput meaning head because capitals are used at the head of a sentence or page, if we wanted to have an opposite term for lower case letters we could take it from the latin word for body, corpus. therefore, something like "corpusal letters" maybe?

I love the word majescule. I want to use it to describe something. I’ll have to think about what.

I wonder what will you decide on, tumblr user official-penis-posts

since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

some people think this is a shitpost so i want to clarify that i am dead fucking serious. make mage the official gender neutral honorific NOW. i want it on my passport. i want it on my bank account. i want doctors and judges to use it for me. i don't care if it sounds a little silly. people thought "missus" sounded crass at first. call me mg.

benefits of mg:

drawbacks: